Down With Reactionary Age of Consent Laws!

Tories’ Anti-Sex Crusade Targets Youth, Gays

Sex is a big part of being a teenager, but if you’re under 16 what was once fun and legal will soon be a crime. Waving the hoary “save our children” banner, the right-wing Conservative government plans to raise the age of consent from 14, which it has been since 1892, to 16. A recent survey showed that at least 25 percent of youth are having sex by the time they are 14. But if Stephen Harper and his justice minister Vic Toews get their way, these youth and their partners will become criminals. At the same time, the Tories have vowed to lower to 14 the age at which youth can be tried and sentenced as adults for some crimes. If these repressive plans become law, you’ll be too young for legal sex, but not too young for jail.

With brazen hypocrisy the Tories are renaming “age of consent” as “age of protection.” Harper & Co. have as much interest in protecting kids as they have in contracting genital herpes. Youth could use some protection—against the ruling class and its repressive state apparatus. It is the capitalist rulers who are the biggest abusers of children in this society. Today one in six children live in poverty, thanks to ever more layoffs, union busting and the destruction of social programs by provincial and federal governments of all stripes.

Now Harper is poised to gut daycare which, outside Quebec, is already costly and scarce. His caucus is rife with religious yahoos who think homosexuality is a plot to destroy the “traditional” family and that Christian holy writ is scientific truth. Attacking daycare, moving to overturn gay marriage, and now the early rumblings of an anti-abortion drive—this is the Tory social agenda. They’ve even resurrected the odious R.E.A.L. Women, using these anti-gay, anti-abortion bigots to promote an entirely bogus “childcare” program which aims to push women out of the workforce and back into the home.

Raising the age of consent won’t stop kids from having sex, but it will make it a lot more dangerous and guilt-ridden. Youth will fear asking for information about birth control, abortion or diseases like AIDS. It is especially punitive for gay youth who, in coming to terms with their sexuality, often seek out older partners. Canada has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world; little wonder, given the pervasive homophobic ugliness both in the schools and outside, that gay youth comprise a third of these deaths.

This crackdown on teen sexuality is another piece in the anti-sex panic which has swept North America over the last 25 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, people were force-fed the lie that there was an epidemic of child molestations and ritual abuse of children, while sexual predators supposedly lurked behind every teacher’s desk. In 1994 Toronto artist Eli Langer was dragged through the courts on charges of producing “child pornography” for his paintings depicting children engaged in sex acts with each other and with adults. And it has only gotten worse. Private consensual acts are increasingly criminalized, and thousands have been victimized in a frenzy over internet porn. False allegations of child sexual abuse or possessing child pornography have destroyed lives, torn up families and led to suicides.

In April, the deadly logic of this was laid bare when a Cape Breton man obsessed with “sex offenders,” Stephen Marshall, drove down to Maine and murdered two men whose names appeared on an internet “sex offenders” registry. One of those killed by the Canadian vigilante was 24-year-old William Elliott. For having a sexual relationship with his girlfriend who was just two weeks shy of 16, Maine’s age of consent, Elliott was jailed for four months in 2002. Smeared as a “sex offender,” his picture and address were to be on this public registry for ten years—and that’s what got him killed. In a very direct way, these cold-blooded murders are a product of the bourgeoisie’s anti-sex hysteria.

“Family values” hypocrisy is hardly the exclusive preserve of Tory bigots. Harper’s move against teen sex picks up where the previous Liberal government left off. The first act of Paul Martin’s regime in 2004 was to introduce Bill C-2 which, among other measures, created a new crime of “sexual exploitation” that makes consent irrelevant. A witchhunter’s dream, the Criminal Code now says that a relationship between someone under 18 and another in a “position of authority” is by definition exploitative, a crime for which the latter could spend up to ten years in jail.

Even this is not enough for the NDP’s federal justice critic, Joe Comartin. He backs a higher age of consent because it will be easier to win convictions for the “crime” of engaging in such relationships—consent be damned! In 2000, the ruling B.C. NDP was at the forefront of a witchhunting frenzy targeting several women teachers for entirely consensual relationships with younger people. And the NDP, like the Tories, wants to lower the age at which youth may be tried as adults, in their case to 16. Peddling such reaction is central to this social-democratic party’s role as a transmission belt for bourgeois ideology into the working class.

The State Anti-Pornography Witchhunt

Alongside the drive to regulate who people have actual sex with, the government also aims to bar everyone from even reading about or viewing depictions of sex, especially if youth are involved. After many years of trials, in 2002 Vancouver resident John Robin Sharpe was acquitted of child pornography charges stemming from his fictional sexual stories and sketches portraying youth. Sharpe successfully used the defense of artistic merit. As an article in the Toronto gay magazine fab noted, this decision became “the legal umbrella under which the first generation of queer youth emerged. The ability to find and create works of art probing sexual taboos… were rights denied previous generations of queers” (22 April 2004).

Furious at Sharpe’s acquittal, the Liberals eliminated the defense of artistic merit. With Bill C-2 now law, the accused must now prove that their creations further the “public good” and have a “legitimate purpose.” As the fab article asked, “So what happens when kids exploring their sexuality through art become their own child pornographers?” Harper’s government plans to close even the shabby “public good” loophole. What next? Will everything from Nabokov’s Lolita to today’s mountain of steamy coming-of-age teen novels be consigned to the censors’ bonfires?

There has been some disquiet in the bourgeois media about the massive sweep of this state anti-porn dragnet. In recent years, thousands have been charged—in 2002-3 alone it was 303. Yet even in a witchhunting social climate the state secured convictions in fewer than half of these cases.

The necessarily arbitrary nature of “child pornography” laws lets the state ensnare almost anyone with this humiliating and fearful accusation. In April, racist border cops subjected Sikh immigrant Paramjit Singh to a terrifying ordeal. Caught in the crosshairs of two state crackdowns, the racist “war on terror” and the anti-porn hysteria, he was charged with possessing child pornography and denied entry to Canada, all for having a few pictures of his naked baby on his cell phone. The charges were dropped, but a chilling edict from the “Public Safety” ministry insisted that “the images of the prepubescent infant by definition is child pornography under the Criminal Code.”

Marxists oppose all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as prostitution, drug use or pornography. We utterly reject the practice whereby looking at pornography is equated with violent crimes such as rape, sexual assault and even murder. We also oppose the criminalization of those who look at child pornography which, like all pornography, is simply words and images designed for pleasure. And while we’re talking about the difference between images and acts, consider the very real acts of sadistic torture and sexual violence carried out on prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo as U.S. imperialist policy.

State Out of the Bedroom!

From the start, we have been outspoken opponents of the anti-sex hysteria. For us Marxists, the guiding principle in sexual relations is that of effective consent, not age, relationship, sex, number or degree of intimacy. This means nothing more and nothing less than mutual agreement and understanding, as opposed to coercion. As long as those who take part agree to do so at the time, no-one, least of all the state, has the right to tell them they can’t do it.

To understate the matter, sexuality is complex. Human society has seen a tremendous variety of social and sexual customs and practices, some of which might give pause to even the most freewheeling among us. Monogamy is at variance with the fundamental instincts of our mammalian species; “transgressions” against it provide inexhaustible fuel for divorce courts and a vast body of literature in many languages.

It was Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s closest collaborator, who laid out a materialist understanding of sexual and familial relationships which, like all social questions, are conditioned by time, place and social relations. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) he wrote:

“Prior to the invention of incest (and it is an invention, and one of the utmost value), sexual intercourse between parents and children could be no more disgusting than between other persons belonging to different generations—such as indeed occurs today even in the most philistine countries without exciting great horror; in fact, even old ‘maids’ of over sixty, if they are rich enough, occasionally marry young men of about thirty.”

In line with this, we do not think intergenerational sex is by definition abusive, nor do we think incest is a priori a crime to be punished by the bourgeois state.

The Family, Private Property and the Bourgeoisie

Absent an understanding of the institution of the family as a key prop in maintaining the capitalist system, one cannot comprehend the bourgeoisie’s irrational and prurient obsession with sexual issues. The family is the central instrument for the subjugation of women (and youth) under capitalism. Its historical function is to transmit private property to “legitimate” heirs through inheritance. This function has little relevance to working-class people, who generally have little to pass on. The family also serves as an ideological bastion of conservatism, instilling obedience to bourgeois codes of morality and retarding the development of social consciousness.

Anything that deviates from this stultifying regime of “one man on one woman for life” is viewed as a threat. This is at the heart of the crusades against pornography, youth sexuality, prostitution, homosexuality and abortion, which aim to regiment the population and bolster family, church and state.

We oppose age of consent laws because we oppose state intervention into people’s private sexual activities. We do not accord the capitalist state the right to decree the age at which youth may engage in consensual sexual activity. To support the state’s right to legislate morality is to support this decaying social order which produces genuinely horrific crimes against women and children.

Such laws also seek to deny the sexuality of young people, especially girls. As we wrote 20 years ago in “Children, Sex, State Witchhunters: The Uses of Abuse”:

“The attitude toward children today is linked to the myth of female asexuality. All children are supposed to be asexual until puberty, at which point boys are expected to become instantly sexually aggressive. Girls are not, even after they are ‘properly’ married at a ‘proper’ age.”

—Women and Revolution No. 29, Spring 1985

At bottom, it’s all about preserving a girl’s chastity for marriage. In the Philippines and Mexico, for example, the legal age of consent is 12. This reflects not a liberal regime of personal freedom for women, but the ruling class’s view that this is the age at which girls can be married off and have children.

Sometimes—especially between youth and older adults—it can be difficult to determine what is effective consent. In addressing the “date rape” hysteria of the mid-1990s, we wrote:

“Consent is always colored by the society we live in. Consensuality is rendered something less than complete when sexist attitudes and economic constraints (however expressed through a complex set of social factors that make them more or less ‘acceptable’) keep estranged couples together. And given the tangle of race, sex and class in this bigoted society, relationships can often be emotionally exploitative and unequal—but to call them ‘crimes’ is to bring in the government, which is the very enforcer of that bigotry and exploitation.”

—“The ‘Date Rape’ Issue: Feminist Hysteria, Anti-Sex Witchhunt,” Women and Revolution No. 43, Winter 1993-Spring 1994

Or, as Irish playwright Brendan Behan put it: “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.”

A Workers Party: Tribune of the People

Sexuality is not in itself a political question. It is the bourgeoisie which politicizes this issue, victimizing those who run afoul of its writ. When that happens, a Marxist party cannot remain silent. In fighting to build a revolutionary workers party, we seek to expose and protest every instance of bourgeois injustice, violence and cruelty. Our defense of the right to enjoy pornography and our rejection of age of consent laws are part of the struggle to lay bare the ways in which the bourgeoisie maintains its grip on the working people.

Almost 30 years ago, The Body Politic, a Toronto gay liberationist newspaper, was hit with police raids and legal repression after publishing a controversial article called “Men Loving Boys Loving Men.” The Trotskyist League joined and built protests in defense of The Body Politic, as did some other left groups. While there was an uproar in some gay and feminist circles about the article’s content, intergenerational sex was not nearly the explosive “hot button” question it is today. Our political debates at the time largely centered on struggling for a Marxist, working-class perspective, as opposed to the sectoralist politics promoted by many gay liberationists.

However, the effects of more than two decades of ideological warfare and state repression have penetrated deeply into society. NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association), which advocates the right to intergenerational sex, is persecuted and hounded. That they have almost no defenders on the left outside of our own organization is a measure of how deeply the so-called “socialist” groups have adapted to “family values” bourgeois reaction. The refusal of gay groups and defenders of gay rights to defend a vulnerable group like NAMBLA is both cowardly and suicidal; it was not that long ago that homosexuality was considered a crime or at best a pathology.

In witchhunts those who dare defend the witches are themselves anathematized. “Only child pornographers, pimps, Internet lurers, child molesters and those involved in child sex tourism would line up against the proposed age of consent legislation,” is how Canadian Press (19 April) reported the views of the anti-prostitution outfit, Beyond Borders. For our defense of NAMBLA against the state, we have been berated by “family values” Maoists, pseudo-Trotskyists and other reformist leftists as “child abusers.” Like their bourgeois puppet-masters, these groups willfully conflate consensual sexual activities with vicious abuse. Their embrace of bourgeois “morality” reflects a fundamental loyalty, however rhetorically masked, to the current social order.

It is very much in the interests of working people to oppose the (currently Tory) offensive against youth sexuality, women and gays. The capitalists’ need for labour, combined with economic necessity, has drawn unprecedented numbers of women out of the home and into the workforce in recent decades. This in turn has produced a reactionary backlash. We fight for the fullest integration of women into the workforce, and for this working people desperately need free, quality 24-hour childcare. Instead, even the paltry and inadequate existing programs are to be slashed, leaving working-class women with the “options” of either paying for expensive daycare or staying home to look after their children, thus living in poverty. Either way, they are bombarded with fear-mongering stories that their kids are in mortal peril, be it by rapists, satanic sexual abusers or drug peddlers. It’s all meant to torment women with guilt about leaving their children in the care of “strangers” while they are at work.

Socialist revolution will lay the basis for replacing the family and drawing women fully into social production. This alone will make possible the liberation of women. Such was the program of the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky which in 1917 led the working class to power in tsarist Russia. The early Bolshevik regime did all it could to implement the promise of women’s emancipation, taking measures toward socializing the private functions of the family. But they lacked the material resources to make this a reality in backward and impoverished Russia, devastated by civil war and imperialist intervention. Their earliest measures included making abortion and homosexuality legal and divorce a mere civil matter.

Real violence is perpetrated daily against women and children under this brutal class system. Social degradation and dehumanization (which permeate sexual relations as all else) are rooted in the nature of this society and the exploitation of labour. The social alienation of a system in which the vast mass of people have to sell their labour power to enrich the very few is compounded by institutionalized inequalities of race, nationality and sex. To create genuinely free and equal relations between people in all spheres, including sex, requires nothing less than the destruction of this class system and the creation of a communist world. In a classless society, social and economic constraints over sexual relations will be non-existent, and in the words of Friedrich Engels, “there is no other motive left except mutual inclination.”